Rietveld Schroder House

The Rietveld Schroder House stands at the edge of Utrecht in the Netherlands, designed in 1924 by the Dutch architect and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld for Truus Schroder-Schrader, who commissioned it as a home for herself and her three children and closely collaborated on its design. Its exterior is composed of interlocking planes and lines of white, grey, black and primary colors, extending the visual language of the De Stijl art movement, of which Rietveld was a leading member, directly into three-dimensional architecture. The first floor was built as a single open, flexible space that could be reconfigured with sliding and folding partitions into separate rooms during the day and at night, an early built expression of open-plan living. UNESCO inscribed the house as a World Heritage Site in 2000, citing it as an outstanding expression of the De Stijl movement's aesthetic ideals in architecture.